Hasta La Ideas

News: online home rental brand Airbnb is to replace a set of aluminium chairs at its new San Francisco headquarters after Emeco, the company that makes the original Navy Chair, pointed out that they were fakes.

Airbnb announced today that it will replace eight chairs after Emeco contacted Dezeen to point out that the chairs were imitations of its patented design.

“With our new office, we have worked hard to create a home for our employees that reflects our company’s culture, values, and brand – including design,” said Airbnb in a statement to Dezeen. “Now that it has been brought to our attention, in this instance we will replace the eight chairs with originals.”

Emeco director of communications Martin Olsson-Prescott emailed Dezeen last week to complain about the fake chairs following our publication of the Airbnb offices, which were designed in-house by the company in homage to rental properties around the world.

“Unfortunately, we are obliged to make you aware of a knockoff product featured in that piece,” Olsson-Prescott. “Seeing a knockoff chair in a Dezeen featured cool space like the Airbnb office would help validate the false form of a knock-off. And the few people who notice might question both Airbnb’s designer and Dezeen’s selectivity.”

The Navy Chair, originally designed in 1944 for use on US Navy submarines, is one of the most widely copied designs of the last century and Emeco has been active in the courts to protect its intellectual property. Last year Emeco settled a lawsuit against American company Restoration Hardware, which was producing £50 copies of the £300 chair.

“We put a lot of efforts and investment into fighting knock-offs,” said Olsson-Prescott, who told Dezeen readers what to look out for when searching for an original Navy Chair.

“There are many small details that distinguish a genuine Emeco Navy chair from a knockoff,” he said. “In this case the biggest giveaway is the shape of the back, which is very rounded. And the spacing between the three bars in the back.”

Emeco’s Navy Chairs are created from recycled aluminium using a 77-step process and are guaranteed for 150 years.

In a video interview with Dezeen last year, Emeco CEO Gregg Buchbinder said his company was working with leading designers to create ever-more sophisticated products in order to deter copying. “The more difficult it is, the more difficult it is for people to knock it off,” Buchbinder said.

The post Airbnb removes “knockoff” Navy Chairs
from new headquarters appeared first on Dezeen.

The Room for Two stool provides and smart and fun solution to lack of seating in our crowded cities. The Room for Two Stool was initially born out of..

Each piece is unique to itself as they are made up of individual timber pieces hand puzzled together. No two tables are alike.

Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek has created a collection of furniture made by meticulously gluing together tiny squares of wood, which are cut from the waste material of his famous scrap wood furniture.

Piet Hein Eek made his name in the 1990s for his Waste furniture assembled by stacking up pieces of scrap material that would otherwise be discarded, and the new Waste Waste 40×40 collection takes the process a step further.

“It’s made of the leftovers from the leftovers,” he told Dezeen when we visited his studio and workshop complex in a former Eindhoven ceramics factory during Dutch Design Week.

Small pieces of timber that can’t be used in the Waste series are cut down into identical squares of 40 by 40 millimetres. These are then glued together to cover the surface of chairs, tables and benches.

“We all of a sudden have a size which determines the design,” explained the designer. “Everything is determined by this 40 by 40 size, so the thickness of the surface is either 40 or 80 and the leg can be either 40, 80 or 120 in width.”

“A round table can’t be round any more and it ends up looking a lot like pixels,” he added. The pieces are made from a mixture of timbers and retain traces of different lacquers and paints on the surface, meaning no two pieces are ever identical. Each object will be numbered consecutively.

Piet Hein Eek began making the Waste furniture as a result of his frustration at having to throw away material because it was too expensive to use it for anything – not because the material itself was worthless but because the cost of labour should make the extra effort required to work with differently shaped and sized scraps of material uneconomical.

He decided to use the material anyway, pretending for a moment that labour was free and materials were worth their weight in gold, and found to his surprise that the products were commercially viable because customers were willing to pay for the extra effort involved.

“As opposed to almost any other product, the waste products are made with the patience of a saint, quite a feat considering this is an age in which time is a rare commodity for pretty much everyone,” he reflected.

The original Waste series is made by gluing up scraps of wood in layers, carefully aligning all the irregular pieces and trimming them individually to fit where needed.

This process leaves behind waste material in smaller quantities and even more awkward shapes that are more difficult to use, though, so Piet Hein Eek reduced the labour required to convert them into the new collection by imposing the fixed shape and size of the squares and using them only as a skin rather than stacking them up to make a structure.

The post Piet Hein Eek uses offcuts from his scrap wood
furniture to make Waste Waste 40×40 appeared first on Dezeen.

Hand polished, Authentic Boeing aircraft 777 wheel.The table has had over 150 hours of labour and is a stunning piece of art!